The Biggest Local Race

We have a very important race here in Harris County, in the Primary runoff election coming up May 24^th. This is for Harris County Judge.

I went to hear the two runoff candidates Tuesday night—along with about 200 close friends and allies who also have a stake in this decision. It was hosted by Towne Lake Republicans, and held at the Weekley Community Center. I’m hoping to see video soon, but for today I’m relying on my audio recording and notes.

Why is this race so important? What does a county judge do? Good question. At a candidate forum, moderator Rep. Mike Schofield spelled out the job description. He said,

We don't call it County Judge intentionally to deceive you. Originally—and in the small counties to this day—the County Judge actually hears cases. The last vestige of that in Harris County went away about ten years ago, when we got rid of the County Judge's jurisdiction over hearing liquor license cases. So now our County Judge is basically the county executive. The Commissioners Court, over which the judge presides, is responsible for the following: adopting a budget for the county, setting tax rates, calling for bond elections, building and maintaining county infrastructure such as roads and bridges, and overseeing county courthouse jails, libraries, parks, and the Harris County flood control district.

Then he asked the two candidates to tell us what makes them qualified to preside over Commissioners Court.

Alexandra del Moral Mealer (left) and Vidal Martinez, getting ready for opening remarks,
at Harris County Judge Republican candidate forum March 29, 2022

We have two very qualified people. Compared to Lina Hidalgo, who holds the position now, almost anyone off the street would have more experience. So it’s a blessing to have choices so far above the low bar she has set.

I made my decision well ahead of the March 1^st Primary, and this forum only solidified my choice.  But I believe I’m choosing the better candidate; I’m not choosing between a good and bad option here.

So the short version is, in the Primary I voted for Alexandra del Moral Mealer (I’ll call her Alex Mealer from here on for brevity), and I will do so again in the runoff. The other runoff candidate is Vidal Martinez, and he’ll get good coverage here as well.

I first heard them both speak in November, at a forum we held at Cypress Texas Tea Party (sorry, videos no longer available). We heard from Alex Mealer again, as our main speaker, in March (video here). And we have scheduled to hear from Vidal Martinez on April 23^rd.

Back in November we had five of the seven County Judge candidates that day. Vidal Martinez went first. I was taking notes and thinking, Wow! He has a lot of really relevant experience. He’s older, but he does seem ready to run a large organization—and Harris County is one of the largest jurisdictions in the country, bigger than many states.

Rep. Mike Schofield moderated at the
candidate forum, March 29, 2022

On Tuesday night, Martinez quantified it this way:

Harris County is a big town. 1700 square miles. 4.7 million people in here. If we were a state, we would be larger—number 22—larger than Louisiana. We're larger than the state of Rhode Island.

I think he may mean our population is larger than Louisiana, and our size is bigger than Rhode Island. Actually, I think we’re comparable to New Jersey in size. He added,

It's two real centers of the population. We have 2.1 million inside the donut with the city, which is predominantly liberal. And we have 2.5 outside of that that is predominantly conservative.

He noted that we had 44 years of conservative governance, with County Judges John Lindsay, Robert Eckels, and Ed Emmett. Until 2018, when Lina Hidalgo came in and tried to wipe out good governance entirely. More on her later, if there’s time.

As I was saying, Martinez seemed qualified.

But…  There’s a problem that struck me in November, and was the issue that brought the most sparks at Tuesday night’s forum as well. But I’d like to cover the qualifications of both of the candidates first.

Vidal Martinez

He has been working here for 47 years—since 1975. (I’m estimating that makes him 72.)

·        He has been a federal prosecutor in Houston.

·        He has been Chairman of the State Bar of Texas.

·        He has been on the Methodist Hospital board—the number 1 hospital in the state for many years.

·        He has been the Houston Port Commissioner.

·        He chaired the Transportation Committee of the Greater Houston Partnership, working for funding of the I-45 expansion (Hidalgo rejected the funding and sued instead; we need to reverse that).

·        He has served on the University of Houston Board.

·        There’s a more complete list of experience on his website. 

He summed up what the county is in charge of as three things: “public safety, public health, and transportation, which is really emergency management.” So he showed how his resume fills all of those categories. Really, his resume is stellar.

 

Alex Mealer

Alex Mealer is much younger. She’s 37, married, and has a couple of small children. Her Facebook page still looks like a regular mom enjoying her family. But packed in her relative youth she has a lot of good experience. As she says, “Not all experience is good experience.” But what she’s done is relevant for this job.

·        She graduated from West Point and began her military career right after 9/11.

·        She joined the Army bomb squad, which is full-time emergency management.

·        In her 20s, she was tasked with getting a bomb squad unit ready to deploy to Afghanistan; Army standard is one year, but she did it in four months.

·        She not only diffused bombs herself (proving calm under pressure); she worked with senior leadership to allocate scarce resources in real time with imperfect information.

·        She was promoted to lead a unit in Iraq: 600 people, 40 locations, to restore a broken unit. This required convincing people to follow her—waiving their home time after a deployment to redeploy with her.

·        After military, she and husband settled in Houston, and she began work in oil & gas—which is where she got her financial expertise and understanding of working with the oil & gas feast-or-famine cycle. This expertise includes knowing:

o   What is the appropriate leverage?

o   How do you raise capital?

o   How do you use your resources efficiently?

She summarizes the County Judge job as having two key functions: “Can you lead a large bureaucracy, and manage a large budget?” She has done both—and both under challenging conditions. With what is maybe the best soundbite for her campaign, she says,

“If I can diffuse a bomb, I can handle the pressures of this job.”

Both candidates have the relevant education, which neither mentioned on Tuesday. Martinez has a law degree, obviously. Mealer has a JD/MBA from Harvard. Mealer's website is here.

 

Improvement Plans

Both of them would probably do similar things for the County—all a 180-degree turn from the current direction. Both of them seem to have a good grasp on the situation. Martinez has long experience. Mealer has done her homework. She’s been gathering the data—and noting that Hidalgo keeps taking down data that might make her look bad, so things are likely worse than they appear. So transparency will be a high priority in the next county administration.

Here are a couple of examples of discussions to come in the general election.

We got funding related to flood control in the wake of Hurricane Harvey. It was to be distributed according to need—where floods happen. Hidalgo has decided to distribute—illegally—according to oppression status. That means, if you’re in an area she can call oppressed because of your skin color, or maybe your economic status, she prioritizes the funds there—and leaves the people who have actually suffered the flooding unserved. Considering how many people all over the county suffered from flooding, some woke nonsense is not going to go over well in November.

And there’s that other thing she’s done—making a bad-faith deal concerning bail bonds. As a result, even the pro-criminal District Attorney Kim Ogg is saying enough is enough; we’ve got to stop letting violent offenders—who are already out on bond when they commit new crimes—back onto the streets. Hidalgo has scuttled funding for law enforcement and sent those funds to whatever are her pet social projects. Note: social projects are not on the list of responsibilities for the County Judge. As a result, it’s hard to hire law enforcement. And we’ve suddenly got the distinction of being the murder capital of the nation—taking that dubious honor away from Chicago.

Martinez mentions some close-to-home examples in his opening remarks:

We now have a little girl getting shot and killed at FM 529 and Fry Road by a stray bullet in a carjacking. Then another carjacking two days later in the same area. Then a vicious attack on a lady at HEB parking lot at Tuckerton and Fry Road. This crime wave has to be taken seriously. I know how to stop it. I know how to stop this nonsense. Keep criminals in jail. Stop the decarceration. Restore funding to law enforcement, and make this community safe for all of you again.

Those are steps Mealer will take as well. And she has ten law enforcement groups endorsing her.

I believe them both on many of the things on our to-do list for the County Judge. Their strength on these things is going to show up well against Hidalgo’s feckless cronyism in a general election. The disastrous results of this County Judge are not in some faraway place; they show up in our faces every day. Even Democrats want safe streets and controlled floods in their own neighborhoods.

 

The Sticking Point

Now for what has been a sticking point for me. Back in November, during the Q&A, someone asked Vidal Martinez about his donations to Lina Hidalgo. This was during her first year, early in her administration, not during a campaign. He explained that he was trying to be supportive, and had been hopeful she would be better. It turned out she was a disappointment.

Really? Because some of us knew from day one that she was a 27-year-old twit, just out of school, with no work experience, and a whole lot of tyrannist philosophy that she was determined to foist on us. Some of us don’t give money to our paid elected officials at all; our taxes do the paying. And we certainly don’t give it for them to use in future campaigns when they are that undeserving.

On Tuesday when he tried to defend those donations, Martinez said,

With Lina Hidalgo—Yes. Every businessman downtown, and every business leader—we had a 27-year-old without a driver's license driving the family car. We were worried about that. We wanted to have access to her. We didn't know until after a donation—and, by the way, any donation to her [Hidalgo] by these businessmen, including her [Mealer’s] supporters that are replete with business, with donations to Lina Hidalgo—we didn't know until about six months later. This is donations that came in after Ed Emmett lost; it wasn’t during the election. She’s a sitting officer. There’s a whale of difference in leadership. You haven’t held any of those folks [previous county leadership] here. But anyway, there’s a whale of a difference in leadership in this county, when you have to deal with Democrats that are in positions of power. And she disappointed us. She disappointed everyone in that 2019 year…. She turned out to be the wrong person.

For someone as high powered as Martinez is, a $1000 donation here and there is like a cost of doing business. It’s like my assuming paying for toll roads is a cost of driving around Houston. Nevertheless, I’m still bothered by it.

I have more questions I would like to ask him: If it’s a cost of doing business, and the way things are done, will you expect donations from people who want access to you in that position? Did you give donations to the Republican predecessors, to have access to them? Or was giving money to “the 27-year-old without a drivers license driving the family car” your first attempt at buying access? And how do we know that you would be completely different?

Alex Mealer summed it up as, “if you can’t understand the difference between donating and pay-to-play,” and asked do “business leaders, to talk to our elected officials, need to pay?”

Martinez is clearly defensive about the accusation. It hurts. Because it loses votes from people like me. And he did it in the interests of business, because he thought he had to. He didn’t think he was doing anything wrong.

The problem is, he accepted it. He didn’t call out the practice. We’re in a day of such corruption, we need to know our elected officials stand against that in every way.

I know a number of respectable people who have known Vidal Martinez a long time, and feel some loyalty toward him. I accept that. They may not be wrong. But I haven’t known him long or well, so this thing really bothers me.

And I see in Alex Mealer a spine of steel. She’s a serious woman. She’s not warm and fuzzy. I can see that gladhanding is not her favorite thing to do; solving problems is her thing.

Me and Alex Mealer
at Cypress Texas Tea Party,
March 19, 2022

I told her at our March meeting that I had endorsed her, and we took a photo. When I arrived on Tuesday, I had timed my arrival just a minute before start time (Houston traffic). She was with a couple of staffers, about to enter the big room where the event was being held. She stopped and turned to come over and shake my hand and call me by name. Not a big deal if you expect that kind of thing—but I do not. A nod would have been sufficient at that moment when she was focused and ready to enter the room. But she took the extra moment. Her whole campaign has been grassroots. Meeting people and remembering them—and inspiring them to have confidence in her—has been what has put her in the lead against such a qualified opponent.

Let me address one more thing between the two candidates. Vidal Martinez has a Latino heritage, and he does speak Spanish. He does not look Hispanic. He claims that Mealer can’t get the Latino vote. She is, however, second generation American; her grandfather fought against the Franco regime in Spain, if I'm remembering right. It was over the issue of speaking Spanish that led to the discussion about the donations to Hidalgo. Mealer said,

What I would say to all that is, when you start donating to Democrats such as Lina Hidalgo and Sheila Jackson Lee, you’re speaking in their language. And what is that language? Divisive identity politics. You do not grow this party and win by saying, “You do not speak fluent Spanish.” I do not speak Spanish. But you don’t get to define how I define myself. I’m a second generation, 50%. And if you look at whose backing me, OSSO, Organization of Spanish Speaking Officers—they didn’t do that because of my ethnicity. They did it because they trusted me to enforce law and order. If you need to talk about identity politics, and want a quota on what you look like, you’re in the wrong party.

All that military background—I think she’s definitely a fighter.

 

Calling Out Corruption

We were speaking of calling out corruption, so I’ll mention, Lina Hidalgo is much worse than simply incompetent. And much worse than simply favoring all the wrong policies. She’s also all about crony corruption. This month we’ve had to deal with her personally appointed Election Administrator—a position she rammed through the Commissioners Court, taking election duties away from the elected County Clerk’s office, where there was accountability to the people. She hired a crony, Isabel Longoria, who had zero election experience and failed abysmally, to the embarrassment of the whole country. The Primary was not her first try; she started with the December 2020 runoff and has been getting worse. Longoria is under a lawsuit from the Harris County Republican Party for failing to meet contractual agreements to run the Primary Election. And Longoria has resigned—as of July 1^st. The problem there is, we have a special districts election on May 7^th and this runoff election on May 24^th. That’s two more elections for her to screw up before she stops taking our money while ruining our democratic right to vote. She says it’s so there will be less disruption, and they can take the needed time to get a replacement—who at that point will not have the practice of those two smaller elections before facing the very challenging midterm election in November.

But that’s not the worst. The same week as the bungled election, Texas Rangers and the DA’s office served a warrant and searched Hidalgo’s offices in the investigation into her crony deal last  year—a contract that she was forced to cancel because it stunk so badly, and she got called out by Commissioner Cagle for it. She chose a political ally, one-person company run out of a room, to receive an $11 million contract for COVID response. That wasn’t just a bad decision—less experience at higher cost than the other bids, including the higher scoring UT Health. Hidalgo and her staff—not her staff only as the media are claiming—were involved in crafting the language of the bid contract. That’s illegal. And very corrupt. And now they have the evidence in hand.

State Senator Paul Bettencourt put out a video giving some of the details. And Alex Mealer's campaign did another one.  Both are brief and worth watching. What I said about Mealer being willing to fight—yeah, she’s not afraid to draw blood.

Lina Hidalgo, screenshot from here

These things move at a glacially slow pace, unfortunately. Hidalgo should be under indictment. Will that happen by the November election? We can only hope.

Better than just wishing is to get out there and vote in the runoff, and then campaign from May to November, to—as Alex Mealer says—"get people excited about good governance,” which she has spent the last half year doing. When it’s something we’re sorely missing, it is something to get excited about.

Is the Cure Worse Than the Disease?

There have been a great many confusing things surrounding this pandemic. This was addressed with good humor in a video online by humorist Adley:

Clarity would be nice.

We have shut down the economy, taking away people’s livelihoods, which brings on many social/emotional issues that are directly related to losing a steady income. And also taking away people’s other healthcare that is deemed non-emergency. Some things can be put on hold for a week or two, or maybe a month. But non-emergencies can get more urgent as days pass. Things like cancer treatments, heart disease care, joint replacement surgery, or even impacted wisdom teeth removal.

In the face of an emergency, we can be compliant. But we want to know that there’s a darn good reason for doing what we’re being asked to do. And we reserve the right to say when enough is enough.

I thought this would be a good time to look at this basic Spherical Model axiom and see how it applies during the pandemic:

Whenever government attempts something beyond the proper role of government (protection of life, liberty, and property), it causes unintended consequences—usually exactly opposite to the stated goals of the interference.

This pandemic response is an interesting case. There’s certainly some element of the proper role of government. But there also appears to be using that as an excuse for asserting power. So let’s take a look.

Asking the Question

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo
screenshot from here

What is the stated goal of shutting down our economy, leading to 27 million unemployed and a self-imposed depression? To save people from dying from the virus. OK. But people have been confined long enough to begin asking, “Is the cure worse than the disease?” That question was actually put to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo yesterday, and here’s how that went: 

Cuomo: The illness is death. What is worse than death?

Reporter: What if somebody commits suicide because they can’t pay their bills?

Cuomo: Yeah, but the illness is maybe my death, as opposed to your death. You said they said the cure is worse than the illness. The illness is death. How can the cure be worse than the illness, if the illness is potential death?

Reporter: What if the economy failing—

Cuomo: Worse than death?

Reporter: Equals death?

Cuomo: No it doesn’t. It doesn’t equal death. Economic hardship—yes. Very bad. Not death. Emotional stress from being locked in a house. Very bad. Not death. Domestic violence on the increase. Very bad. Not death. And, not death of someone else. See, that’s what we have to factor into this equation.

But the illness doesn’t mean certain death. The illness is very close to certain survival. Except for a few with certain underlying conditions, “the odds are always in our favor.”[i] Just today a study announced that the state of New York has a 13.9% infection rate. That’s 2.7 million people statewide. Infection rate within New York City is probably 21.2%. But as an Epoch Times story reports today:

With about 15,500 current fatalities linked to COVID-19 in New York, the death rate, or mortality rate, would be 0.5 percent.

That means that in New York, the hardest hit place in the US, where the disease has killed more than most of the rest of the US combined, contracting the infection means survival for 995 out of every 1000 people. As diseases go, 0.5% fatality rate is high. Flu is about 0.1%. But 0.5% doesn’t equal death, as Governor Cuomo implies.

In fact, as we went into this society shutdown, lacking even the data we have now, we feared the disease might kill 3-5%. That still means 95-97% survival of those who contract it, but that was considered too risky. It’s several orders of magnitude higher than the flu. So we shut down the world based on that fear.

What would we have chosen to do if we had known the rate was 0.5% in our worst hit area, and maybe equivalent to the annual flu for the rest of us? We didn’t have that information, but I’m asking it hypothetically.

Does shutting down save some lives? Probably. But denigrating anyone as heartless and selfish for wanting to risk going back to work is disingenuous. We don’t shut down the world because of the annual flu, or because of car accidents. Why this particular virus, then?

In government’s basic role of protecting life, liberty, and property, can government protect life from this virus at the expense of our liberty and property without limit?

Government’s Goal

Let’s state government’s goal a little more specifically. It is to slow the spread of the virus:

·         to prevent the medical resources from being overwhelmed.

·         to buy time for development of treatments, preventions, testing, and medical resources.

People have been pretty willing to accomplish those things. The first has been accomplished in most areas. New York is past their peak. New Jersey and some other areas are still facing bad times, but so far we haven’t faced what Italy did, having to choose who had to die for lack of resources.

Governor Abbott of Texas pointed out[ii] that, while we have a number of cases in our large cities, and at places around the state, overall, we have had a death rate of 17 per million population. This is while New York has had a death rate of 989 deaths per million. The US as a whole has had 131 deaths per million.

That shows that Texas has been doing something right—or has been very fortunate.

With New York’s mortality from the virus 58 times higher than Texas, should Texas continue requiring people to stay home until New York gets to our levels? Remember, that means taking people’s liberty and property. Can that be justified when the medical resources, even in New York, are not overwhelmed, and the spread has already been delayed?

Or can we balance saving lives from coronavirus while getting back to regaining our liberty and property?

It seems reasonable, in places like Texas, to slowly start going out. As Governor Abbott explained the opening up process:

If you’re going grocery shopping or whatever the case may be, you know that you’ve gone to the store and you’ve been able to do that without spreading the coronavirus. We want people, as they begin to go to the hair salon, or as they begin to go to restaurants, as they begin going to a movie theater—whatever they may be doing as we begin to open up businesses—maintain those safe, healthy, distancing practices so that we can assure that we can open up without spreading the coronavirus.

There will be some uptick in cases as we do this. But if we can maintain a manageable level, that seems more prudent than a siege mentality that locks us in our homes until we starve or get evicted. Whatever we’ve been doing has already been keeping the death rate low. Opening gradually doesn’t mean we necessarily kill more people. It means the Governor is keeping those two “slow the spread” goals in mind and is avoiding using the crisis to grab power.

The Governor is hopeful that by fall schools can open. Most people attending schools are less susceptible to severe illness. Those who are in higher risk groups (that includes me) may need to be hypervigilant longer than young, healthy people. And we can hope that treatments are available by fall so that we can find a way to normalize post-Covid-19.

Here in Houston the public health data shows that we hit our peak around April 4^th or at the latest April 9^th.

Houston Daily Case Count as of April 23, 2010
provided on Facebook by Leslie Joan May

Yet I heard on news that we’ll hit our peak around the first week of May, inconsistent with the data. That’s confusing.

The county set up a temporary hospital in a stadium parking lot downtown; not a single bed was used. It is being dismantled.

Nevertheless, yesterday our county judge Lina Hidalgo announced a new requirement that everyone leaving their homes needed to be wearing a facemask, starting Monday, for 30 days. Noncompliance can result in $1000 fine and jail time.

Why now, when the voluntary social distancing we’ve been doing has done its intended work already? Where is the data showing that wearing a mask when not near people avoids spreading the virus person-to-person?

This same county judge has been attempting to let felons (including violent felons in her first attempt)  out of jail because of the virus—because the virus spreads there. So, she would like to let felons back out on the street, not with a 14-day quarantine, because—where would they quarantine if they have to find housing first? Yet if we law-abiding citizens want to walk to the park without a mask on—away from all other humans, outdoors—we are the criminals.

Something is wrong with this picture.

People have been willing to wear masks. And do all the social distancing that has been asked of us. Mostly in the name of helping others rather than ourselves, regardless of Governor Cuomo’s accusations about heartless people who want to get back to work. Most people are reasonable and considerate. If they’re going to a place with a lot of contact (grocery stores, doctors’ offices, essential work around others), they’re going to be willing to wear a mask—now that government finally admitted that mask wearing helps to prevent spread both from the infected and to the uninfected. But being coerced to wear one in places where there is no need because there is no human contact with someone who hasn’t been in our house with us all along—that’s not even reasonable.

What if someone is already recovered from the disease and is no longer either contagious or susceptible? Are they exempt? No. They are considered criminal for not wearing a mask, even in places where they couldn’t spread it regardless.

To add to the lack of credibility, Judge Hidalgo wore her mask at the press conference yesterday, at least part of the time with her nose uncovered—unclear on the concept. One would assume that she is far enough away from others at a press briefing that wearing a mask, other than for demonstration purposes, would just make her harder to understand and would contribute nothing toward safety.

In a rather embarrassing lack of attention to detail, the graphic covering the story on the news listed things you can use as “homemade masks, scarfs, or bananas,” which had social media coming up with some creative responses.

Found on Texas State Rep. Valoree Swanson's Facebook page

The question is not whether masks might be effective in preventing the spread of the virus. The question is whether coercion is a valid way for government to encourage the practice.

Threats to Life, Liberty, and Property

What does coercion do? Does it protect life? Maybe a tiny bit under some circumstances. But our goal has never been to prevent all cases, or even all deaths (although we wish we could); our goal has been to slow the spread for those two purposes listed above. Since what we’re doing has already accomplished that, why this added coercion now?

If we don’t ask the questions, then we suffer significant loss of liberty and property for the sake of some vague sense that we’re preserving life when in reality we might not even be doing that.

Government isn’t in control of the existence of the virus. In an emergency—which this seemed to be—we were willing to take some drastic temporary measures to preserve life. But even under these circumstances, when government takes away a person’s business, that relates to the “takings” clause; government can’t take that without just compensation. And because government produces nothing, that just compensation comes from taxpayers—which means workers making income; it is a finite amount made smaller by the stay-at-home orders.

Has government done the right thing to shut down? We may not know until we have hindsight and a whole lot more data.

Is government doing the right thing when it continues a suspension of our liberties and the taking of our properties in the name of saving lives? Certainly not if it can’t connect the dots between its actions and lives saved. Certainly not if there are other ways to accomplish the saving of lives (special care for the most vulnerable, for example.) Certainly not if the “cure” is worse than the “disease.”

So, about government interference. Does the purpose—saving lives from coronavirus—qualify as a proper role of government? Probably. Does saving all lives from this virus at the expense of other possible causes of death and at the expense of our liberty and property qualify? The protests we’re beginning to see show that the people say no.

Are there unintended consequences to government stepping beyond its proper role? Yes. Some of them life threatening. Most of them threatening to our liberty and property—which amount to the living of our lives. When government “saves” our life by taking our “livelihood,” preventing us from “making a living,” is that really saving our life? In a few cases out of a thousand, possibly. But in an overwhelming majority of cases, the answer is no. Maybe we’re getting to the point where sensible people can assess their own risk and act accordingly.

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[i] Yes, I’m quoting from The Hunger Games.

[ii] On Glenn Beck Radio, Wednesday, April 22, 2020. Behind a paywall, here.